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Thursday, December 8, 2016

The Orthodox Conception

Today, the feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is an ancient feast in the Eastern Churches, but a fairly new one in the Latin world. The Greek churches observe this feast under the name Maternity of St. Anne on December 9th, while the Roman Church, before 1570 and since Pius IX, has called it the Immaculate Conception.

The Immaculate Conception is a remarkable doctrine that could only have crystallized under Scholasticism, even though Latin Scholasticism failed to do so. It was Western medieval thinking under Scotus, although not Aquinas' intellectual tradition, that provided a vocabulary to talk about something intuitively believed since ancient times. If Scholasticism is strictly limited to the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, then the Western Scholastics got the Immaculate Conception wrong, but the Angelic Doctor's self-professed biggest fan, George Gennadios Scholarios (first post-Byzantine patriarch of the Greek Church), got right.

In the years since 1453 the Orthodox Church has embraced mysticism as its perspective and Greek patristics as its creed, but much has changed since the fall of Constantinople, not the least of which is the closing of discussion to other manners of theology, a shame for a Church that had such a varied tradition (the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Symeon, Palamas, and the Greek Scholastics). There was a time when, despite arguments about how thick bread should be or whether a word in Latin was as heretical as it was in Greek, a mutually influential discussion could still transpire about the Mother of God. Christiaan Kappes, a rare Catholic priest with original thoughts, has given an interview plugging his book on the Immaculate Conception and its roots in Greek theology. Brush up on your Byzantine thought here (although I am not generally a fan of that blog).

16 comments:

I don't see how scholasticism was required to formulate the Immaculate Conception. It was already there in St. Augustine's emphasising how children need to be washed of original sin - all you need to do is mention that the Blessed Virgin Mary was exempt from this, and you have the Immaculate Conception.

Thanks for the link. Very interesting and productive guy seems to be this Fr. Kappe. His connections to the FI also might speak favorably for him. From this interview, however, this passage lighted in me some red warning lights: "Augustine’s physicalist theory of traducianism is to be rejected entirely." Isn't he here crossing a line drawn by the infallible magisterium?

Can anyone here find the feast for the IC in this breviary? http://purl.pt/22000 It is a 15th century Bragan breviary. I can see in the kalendar it is still known and the Conception of Saint Mary, but I can't seem to find the texts. Any help would be welcome.

I believe that in the pre-Tridentine rite of the Curia there was a unique Mass for the "Immaculate Conception" which St Pius V replaced with the Nativity of the BVM Mass. Was the Immaculate Conception Mass a short-lived aberration? Something imported from Gallican sources?

Indeed, it appeared certainly in Curial missals both MSS and early printed editions. I doubt if it was Gallican in origin though and would suggest it was probably the Franciscan influence at the time (with a corresponding excising of references to heretical popes in the Breviary).